Baker Artist Portfolios

Sheila Crider, currently based in Baltimore, Maryland, relocated from nearby Washington, D. C in November 2022. She started her visual art practice with The Original Response Handmade Envelopes and Books in art fairs and craft markets in the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, she began submitting to open calls to exhibit work made from her hand dyed papers and, in 2009, was awarded her first public art project. She has been artist-in-residence at the Banff Center, Leighton Studios, in Alberta, Canada, Cite International des Arts in Paris and apprentice to a sumi-e ink master in Aioi, Japan. Recipient of several fellowships and project grants, her work is represented in both public and private collections internationally.

Artist' Statement
blackstraction (blak-strak’sh-n) n.
1. The objectification of abstract painting 2. A non-representational work of art stressing formal internal relationships using African/Asian/American art practices at times employing craft techniques and three-dimensional presentation.

In my practice, I make objects and create installations around social and/or aesthetic ideas – a fusion of image, object, and frame. I coined the term blackstraction to refer to the objectification of painting in 2000, the result of research experimenting with painting and drawing to study abstract art as language that began in 1980. Reading Jeanette Winterson’s 1995 essay “Art Objects” helped to solidify my belief that the future of painting is in objects- a natural outcome of Modernism.

In 2016, I started working with quilt batting which proved a much stronger support for the cutting, stitching and other favored manipulations. I put down canvas to absorb excess from painting the quilt batting and, in 2021, used these canvases painted on both sides to create a series of three-dimensional works. My current studio goal is to find a narrative aesthetic that uses canvas and quilt batting in a seamless integration of the image.